SKETCHES OF THE LIVES OF
NOTED RED MEN AND WOMEN
WHO HAVE APPEARED ON THE WESTERN CONTINENT.
BRANT, RED JACKET, UNCAS, MIONTONIMO.
A NOTICE OF THE BIOGRAPHIES OF THE LATE COL. WILLIAM L. STONE, PREPARED
FOR THE DEMOCRATIC REVIEW—1843.
The Egyptians embalmed their dead in myrrh and spices, but the blessed art of printing has given us a surer and less revolting method of preserving and transmitting to posterity, all that is truly valuable in the plaudits of virtue, worth, and honor. Books thus become a more permanent memorial than marble, and by their diffusion scatter those lessons among all mankind, which the age of mounds and hieroglyphics, stone and papyrus, had confined to the tablet of a shaft, or the dark recesses of a tomb or a pyramid. It is never to be forgotten, that in the development of this new phasis in the history of the human race, it was printing that first lit the lamp of truth, and has driven on the experiment, till the boundaries of letters have well nigh become co-extensive with the world. If we do not widely err, there is no part of the globe, where books of all descriptions have become so cheap and abundant as they are at this time in the United States, and, laying aside all other considerations, we may find a proof of the position stated in the fact, that our vernacular literature is no longer confined to the production of school books, the annals of law and divinity, the age of muddy pamphlets, or the motley pages of the newspaper. We have no design to follow up these suggestions by showing how far the study of the natural sciences, the discussion of political economy, or the advances of belles-lettres, have operated to produce this result; far less to identify those causes, in the progress of western arts and commerce, which have concurred to bring down the price of books, and scatter the blessings of an untrammelled press, among all classes. It is sufficient for our purpose to say that even the lives of our distinguished native chieftains have come in for a share of modern notice, and, we feel proud to add, of a notice which, so far as it reaches, is worthy of the subject. And should our contributions on this head, for the last few years, be equally well followed up for a few years to come, even the desponding strains of one of their own impersonated heroes can no longer be repeated with perfect truth:
“They sink, they pass, they fly, they go,
Like a vapor at morning's dawn,
Or a flash of light, whose sudden glow
Is seen, admired, and gone.
“They died; but if a brave man bleeds,